Your old PBX is a beige box in a closet with a punchdown block, a battery backup nobody has tested in years, and a tech who shows up at $150/hr when something breaks. Moving to hosted VoIP is not a software upgrade. It is the closet emptying out.
What you actually retire
An analog or hybrid PBX needs a few things to keep working: the chassis itself, station cards and trunk cards for every phone and outside line, a UPS, copper home-runs back to that closet, and a contract with a tech who knows the firmware. When that hardware ages out, the upgrade quote is usually four or five figures before you have added a single new feature.
A hosted VoIP system pushes the call control to our data centers. The only hardware left at your office is a PoE switch, your router, and the phones. No station cards. No trunk cards. No box on the wall. We are an operator, not a reseller, which means when something needs to change in the dial plan, it changes that afternoon, not after a ticket gets routed through three layers of partner support.
The list of things that go away when the PBX leaves is longer than people remember: the maintenance contract, the UPS battery replacement cycle, the after-hours call to a tech when a station card dies, the voicemail-only-on-the-PBX limitation, the lack of mobile integration, the inability to add a remote worker without ordering a new station card, the copper PRI or T1 lines from the telco that bill at four to six hundred dollars a month for a dozen channels, and the long list of features your current system technically supports but nobody ever set up because the documentation was a binder from 2009.
What you put in instead
Three pieces, and that is it:
- Internet that holds up. A wired connection is still better than Wi-Fi for desk phones. We size it at roughly 100 kbps per concurrent call with G.711, plus headroom for everything else on the network. A 100/100 fiber circuit covers a 30-seat office without breaking a sweat.
- A PoE switch. Power and data over the same Ethernet cable means no wall warts behind every phone. Spend the extra money on a managed PoE switch with QoS so voice traffic gets priority when someone uploads a giant file.
- Phones, softphones, or both. Yealink and Polycom desk sets, our softphone app on a laptop, or our mobile app on a phone. Same extension, same voicemail, same caller ID.
Browse the specific models we provision at our hardware catalog. We do not lock you into proprietary handsets and we do not mark them up to hide a margin in the seat price. If you have existing Yealink or Polycom hardware that is still under support, we can usually re-provision it to our platform rather than make you re-buy phones.
The network side, in detail
Most analog-to-VoIP failures we see are network failures pretending to be VoIP failures. A SIP call that drops every Tuesday at 2pm is almost always a circuit that gets oversubscribed when the marketing team starts a video meeting. The fix is not on the phone system; it is on the LAN. Specifically: a managed switch with QoS, voice VLANs that separate voice traffic from data, and a router that respects DSCP markings on egress. We document this for every cutover, and for offices that do not have an IT team, we coordinate with the local cabling and network vendor.
Bandwidth math, honestly
A G.711 call uses about 100 kbps each direction. A G.729 call uses about 32 kbps each direction. Add 20-30% overhead for packet headers. For 30 concurrent calls on G.711 you need roughly 3 Mbps of dedicated voice bandwidth on a clean network. Most Central Florida fiber circuits are 100/100 or better, so the math is comfortable; the constraint is usually QoS and contention, not raw bandwidth.
What it costs, monthly
This is where the math gets honest. Our Phone Service is $15/user/mo on the Per-Minute plan with outbound at $0.025/min, or $32/user/mo on the All-Inclusive plan with unlimited US and Canada. Most offices that make more than ~700 outbound minutes per seat per month land on All-Inclusive.
If your team is mostly mobile, the Pro Mobile plan starts at $42/user/mo for voice and goes up to $62 for unlimited data with a business eSIM that drops the personal cell-phone reimbursement line off the books entirely. See replacing the cell phone allowance for the breakdown.
A 20-seat office, line by line
Take a typical Central Florida professional services office: a managing partner, two department heads, twelve producers, three admin staff, a receptionist, and a part-time bookkeeper. Their current analog PBX bill: roughly $850/mo for two PRI circuits, $120/mo in maintenance, and a $4,200 station-card upgrade quote sitting on the manager's desk.
The hosted equivalent: 20 All-Inclusive seats at $32 = $640/mo. Two physical sites tied together at no extra cost. New phones financed over 36 months for about $15/seat/mo, optional. Total monthly, including hardware financing: roughly $940. The numbers are close. The features are not. The hosted version includes call recording, mobile apps, IVR, queues, voicemail-to-email (voicemail transcription is a paid add-on, not included), and presence. The PBX includes none of those at that price.
A 50-seat field-service shop, with mobile
Different math, different shape. Twelve people in the office (dispatch, owners, sales), thirty-eight techs in the field. Office staff on All-Inclusive seats: 12 x $32 = $384/mo. Field techs on Pro Mobile voice-plus-10GB: 38 x $48 = $1,824/mo. Total: $2,208/mo, plus the $99-$299/mo AI Receptionist handling overflow and after-hours. Compare that to the prior reality: a $1,400/mo PBX bill plus $85/mo cell allowance per tech ($3,230/mo for the field), with no integration between the two, and any tech who quits walks away with the customer phone numbers in their personal contacts. The hosted version is cheaper and the company actually owns the work numbers.
The migration itself
For a typical 20- to 50-seat cutover in Central Florida, the work goes like this:
- We pull a current call log and map every extension, hunt group, after-hours flow, and DID.
- We port your numbers ($15 per number, both directions, no surprise charges later) and stage the new extensions in parallel.
- If your existing cabling is decent Cat5e or better, we reuse it. We add a PoE switch and configure QoS.
- Cutover happens off-hours. The old PBX stays powered until the port window closes, then the phones get unplugged.
- E911 addresses get registered for every device. This matters: an unauthorized misdial from a device with a bad 911 record is a $150 non-refundable charge, and we do not want that to be how anyone learns the policy.
How long it takes
For an office under 30 seats with clean cabling, two weeks is realistic from contract to cutover. Most of that is the porting window, not our work. Larger offices, multi-location deployments, or sites with cabling problems run longer. We will tell you which one you are during the site walk, not after the deposit. The phases that take the longest are not the technical ones; they are call-flow design conversations with the customer about how they actually want the new system to behave, which is rarely the same as how the old one behaved.
What porting actually looks like
The porting process is regulated by the FCC and runs on industry-standard timelines. For most US numbers, simple ports complete in 7-15 business days from when the losing carrier accepts the LOA. Complex ports (long account numbers, multiple billing names, large blocks) take longer. We submit the paperwork, follow up daily, and tell you when the firm order commitment (FOC) date lands so you can plan the cutover night. Toll-free numbers run on a separate process through RespOrg; they are usually faster.
What about Wi-Fi phones?
Wi-Fi works for softphones and for handsets in spaces where running cable is genuinely impossible (historic buildings, leased retail). It is not what we recommend for a call center seat or a busy front desk. Wired phones do not drop a call when somebody's microwave fires up.
What about failover?
Two layers. At the phone, dual PoE switches with hot standby keep the handsets up if a switch dies. At the call control layer, our platform fails over between data centers automatically, and we can route calls to mobile apps or external numbers if your office internet drops entirely. For mission-critical sites we recommend a backup LTE or secondary fiber circuit; we wire the router to failover automatically so calls keep flowing even if the primary line goes down.
Common mistakes when planning the move
- Skipping the call-flow mapping. People assume their hunt groups and after-hours rules are obvious. They are not. The half-day spent diagramming the current system is the half-day that prevents a chaotic Monday morning.
- Porting one number at a time. Do the whole block at once if you can. Spread-out ports mean a longer window where calls split between systems.
- Ignoring fax. Fax over IP without a real fax service drops pages. Use vFAX ($25/$35/$49/custom) instead of trying to pass T.38 through your firewall.
- Underspeccing the internet. A 25/5 DSL line worked for analog. It will not work for 30 concurrent VoIP calls plus everyone's Teams meetings. Get the circuit right before you cut over.
- Forgetting the door buzzer, alarm panel, or elevator phone. These are usually analog and they do not move to a SIP phone gracefully. We use analog telephone adapters (ATAs) for those, and we plan for them up front.
- Trying to cut over during a busy week. Cutovers happen evenings or weekends. The day of the cutover is the day everyone is paying attention; do not pile other changes on top of it.
- Letting users keep their old voicemail PINs. Half of those PINs are 1234. New system, new policy, new PINs.
What to ask any provider you are evaluating
- Are you the operator or a reseller? If something breaks at 7pm, who picks up?
- What is your published port fee, both directions? Hidden $50 charges are common.
- Is voicemail transcription included or an add-on? On our platform, transcription is a paid add-on. We say so plainly.
- What happens to my numbers if I leave? They are yours. We port them out for $15 each, same as porting in.
- Is E911 registered automatically per device, and what is the misdial fee? Ours is $150, non-refundable, and we register every device by default.
- Do you charge per-minute for inbound? We do not on All-Inclusive seats. Some providers do.
- What is the contract term? We do month-to-month for most plans; ask what your provider locks you into.
- How do recordings, call logs, and voicemails come with me if I switch? Get a clean export path in writing before you sign.
Where this fits with the rest of your stack
Most offices that retire an analog PBX also rethink the rest of the communications stack at the same time. A few common adjacencies:
- Practices and clinics often add the AI Receptionist at $99/$199/$299 (plus $49/mo for HIPAA) to handle after-hours and overflow.
- Field-heavy businesses move desk-phone seats to Pro Mobile for the techs and keep desk phones for dispatch.
- Teams already standardized on Microsoft 365 add the Microsoft Teams integration so calling lives inside the client they already use.
- Sales teams and call centers layer on the CRM integrations for screen-pops and click-to-dial.
- Companies still sending paper fax (legal, medical, real estate closings) move to vFAX instead of trying to keep an analog fax line alive on the new system.
- Multi-location operators tie sites together with shared dial plans; see multi-location.
Industries we work with most
The migration patterns repeat per industry. Property management companies want maintenance routing and tenant lookup. Field service shops want mobile-first with dispatch integration. Healthcare practices and dental practices want HIPAA-aware voicemail and the AI Receptionist. Legal firms want recording, matter tracking, and BLF. Real estate brokerages want lead routing through Follow Up Boss with round-robin distribution. The PBX migration is the same in every case; the configuration is what changes.
Where to start
If you have an analog PBX still humming along, the question is not whether it gets replaced. It is whether you replace it on your timeline or after it fails. We do free site walks for Central Florida businesses and remote scoping for everyone else. Get in touch and we will pull your current bill apart line by line and show you what the hosted version actually costs. If you would rather see prices first, the full menu lives at pricing. If you want to see how we stack up against other providers before you call, the comparisons live at vs.